The present disclosure relates to an image forming system, a server, and an image forming method, and particularly to an image forming system, a server, and an image forming method that perform dead/alive monitoring of at least part of the servers.
Conventionally, there are image forming apparatuses such as a multifunctional peripheral (MFP) and the like capable of printing text and images.
In addition, there are also image forming systems that include servers that perform maintenance management of these image forming apparatuses. In this image forming system, dead/alive monitoring may be performed for monitoring whether or not the apparatuses, processes and the like are actually active (operating).
Here, as a conventional system that performs dead/alive monitoring, in typical techniques, there is an dead/alive monitoring server technique that monitors whether or not data transmission/reception is being performed for each of the servers included in a server group. In the case where monitoring results are obtained when data transmission and reception are not being performed, a dead/alive-monitoring server transmits dead/alive-monitoring data to a server that obtained the monitoring results via a first network that is used for transmitting and receiving data. Moreover, in the case where there is no response to transmitted dead/alive-monitoring data, the dead/alive-monitoring server notifies a distributing apparatus that distributes and executes arbitrary processing to each of the servers included in a server group about the server, which there is no response.
According to this typical technique, dead/alive monitoring can be executed reliably and quickly.